Blekko Search Powers Topix

Blekko hasn’t been getting the same degree of media attention that it did in the anti-Google-spam blitz early this year. However,Blekko has continued its unique style of promotion which includes killing spam with as much ruthless violence as your average Bond villain, giving away free stuff (including t-shirts), and developing a strong base of web partners. Blekko has been growing consistently, if perhaps not dramatically: the site has reached roughly 575 thousand unique visitors each month and over a million searches each day. An additional partnership will give both those figures a substantial boost. That partnership is with Topix, the local news aggregator.

Topix was founded back in 2004. It now aggregates data from 50,000 local news sources, and sees about 13 million unique visitors each month. Those visitors conduct approximately one million in-site searches on a monthly basis, and those searches will now be powered by the Blekko, the slashtag search engine.

Why, exactly? For one, Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson, the CEO and Marketing VP over at Blekko, were both founding members ofTopix. The partnership likely came naturally, but if that’s the case, why not have Blekko powering Topix from day one? It seems that the move, for Skrenta and Markson, is a vote of confidence in their own product; since their November release, the site has apparently received enough positive feedback that it’s worthwhile to integrate it with other web properties.

All features of Blekko remain functional on these specialized searches, including the famous “slashtag” (the ability to add a command that gives more specified information, such as /liberal for only left-wing political analysis; the slashtag feature is supported by Blekko visitors and editors who can help declare which tags a site should be classified with). Other websites now being powered by Blekko include the two question-and-answer sites Stack Overflow and Merchant Circle. Blekko, meanwhile, is actively seeking additional partnership to help spread the good word of Blekko’s search.